Making Peace Visible

When India-based reporter Amy Yee got a call from her editor to cover a press conference with the Dalai Lama, she stopped what she was doing and booked the next flight. She was headed for Dharamsala, where the Buddhist leader and thousands of Tibetan refugees make their home. It was March 2008, and the Dalai Lama was responding to violence in Tibet, where demonstrations against Chinese rule led to a government crackdown. At least 1...

“Humans are not rational beings with emotions. In fact, we're just the opposite. We're emotionally based beings who can only think rationally when we feel that our identities, as we see them, are understood and valued by others.”

Those words from neuroscientist Bob Deutch triggered a lightbulb moment in the mind of Tim Phillips, a veteran peacebuilder and educator. This is what the field of conflict resolution had been missing: a sc...

Intergenerational trauma, also called historical trauma, is defined as cumulative emotional and psychological wounding over the lifespan and across generations, emanating from massive group trauma experiences.

The brutal October 7th attacks by Hamas inside of Israel, and the IDF’s seemingly relentless assault on Gaza have captured the world’s attention for the past six months. In this episode, we attempt to understand the psychologi...

In the news media, war gets more headlines than peace, conflict more airtime than reconciliation. And in our polarized world, reporting on conflict in a way that frames conflicts as us vs. them, good vs. evil often serves to dig us in deeper. On Making Peace Visible, we speak with journalists and peacebuilders who help us understand the human side of conflicts and peace efforts around the world. From international negotiations in C...

After over two decades as a journalist, including ten years covering terrorism and disasters for TIME Magazine, Amanda Ripley thought she understood conflict. But when momentum started to build around the candidacy of Donald Trump, she questioned what she thought she knew. Ripley interviewed psychologists, mediators, and people who had made it out of seemingly intractable conflicts for her book, High Conflict: Why We Get Stuck and ...

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Reza Sayah is an Iranian-American journalist, currently based in Tehran. He’s reported on major events around the world including the Ukrainian Revolution of 2004, the Second Iraq War, and the Egyptian Revolution. 

Reza has spent much of his career working for major broadcast news networks including ABC, CNN, and Al Jazeera. In those ro...

As of May 2023, there were an estimated 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide, according to the UN High Commissioner for Refugees. 

Many are escaping wars, gang violence or repressive regimes, others are fleeing climate change impacts. Some are leaving collapsed economies where they can’t feed their families. How journalists cover refugees and immigration has a major impact on public perceptions. 

This is the first in a ser...

On Making Peace Visible, we are always questioning the mantra, if it bleeds, it leads. Boston’s Charles Stuart murder case is a classic example of what can go horribly wrong when you follow that mantra.    

Charles Stuart was a father-to-be from the suburbs of Boston. Shortly after attending a birthing class in the city with his wife, Carol, Charles Stuart placed a 911 call. The couple had both been shot in their car. Stuart said a ...

In this episode we’re featuring a recent interview with our host, documentary filmmaker and lifelong peace activist Jamil Simon on This is My Silver Lining, a podcast about ordinary people doing extraordinary things, with an emphasis on life’s unexpected twists.

Jamil has certainly had plenty of those. In 1990 he took a job in Tunisia designing communication strategies to promote water conservation and family planning. He would go o...

Making Peace Visible is a show about how the media covers peace and conflict. One of the major reasons we make it is because peace gets so little coverage in the news media. When we do hear news about peace, it's usually focused on signing an agreement. When that’s done, the cameras, and the world's attention move on.  

But that handshake moment is just a fragment in a peace process. It often takes years of building trust and openne...

Between democracy and autocracy is an anocracy, defined by political scientists as a country that has elements of both forms of government — usually one that’s on the way up to becoming a full democracy or on the way down to full autocracy. This messy middle is the state when civil wars are most likely to start, and the one that requires the most diligence from that country’s citizens to prevent a civil war from breaking out.

This w...

In the United States, about one sixth of the federal budget goes to defense. This year the country spent more on the military than any year since 2001 – over $816 billion. Why does spending continue to rise in the wake of US withdrawal from Afghanistan?  Why are many Americans so passive in the face of the massive expenditures for defense that crowd out spending on human needs like education, healthcare and infrastructure? Why does...

Trey Kay knows both sides of America's partisan divide intimately. He was born and raised  in a conservative family in Charleston, West Virginia. As a young man he moved to New York City, where he later became a producer on the arts and culture program Studio 360, at WNYC. 

These days, Trey splits his time between New York and West Virginia to make Us & Them, an award-winning  narrative podcast about America’s culture wars, in partn...

Western media has often referred to India as the world’s largest democracy. But during the last decade, the world has witnessed the decline of many democratic institutions in India. In a recent Time Magazine article our guest Suchitra Vijayan questions whether India can still be called a democracy.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have been especially harsh towards critics of the regime, including journalists. Journal...

On Making Peace Visible we usually focus on stories -- narratives about peace and conflict that are told in the news, on social media, and shared in our collective zeitgeist. We’ve seen examples of how storytelling can both stoke the fire of war and encourage peaceful dialogue. In this episode, we look at a different, but related way of creating space for peace: design. 

Our guest Cynthia Smith is the Curator for Socially Responsibl...

One way to cover war is to follow the road offered by the dominant army. In Afghanistan, that often meant journalists were embedded with U.S. or NATO troops, and saw the war and the world around it through their eyes. 

Guest Bette Dam is a Dutch journalist who covered the war in Afghanistan for 15 years. She began her coverage in 2006, embedded with the Dutch troops fighting there. She’s the author of two books: Looking for the Enem...

We talk a lot on this show about the reasons why peace and conflict resolution aren’t more visible in the news media and our public conversation.

Our past guests have presented a variety of explanations: TV news segments are too short to talk about much beyond dramatic events, like battles and coups. For-profit media doesn't cover peace efforts because there's not enough interest in peace to attract advertisers. Conflict and divisiv...

If you're interested in learning about how peace gets made and unmade and then remade, Colombia is an amazing laboratory. Guest Elizabeth Dickinson is a senior analyst with the Crisis Group in Colombia. Dickinson spends her days in discussion with communities most affected by the civil war, as well as former FARC members. She and her colleagues use information gathered in the field to make policy recommendations to the government a...

After the peace agreement their leaders signed with the Colombian government in September 2016, members of the FARC guerilla group began turning in their weapons to the UN. In exchange, rank-and-file members received amnesty for acts of violence they committed during the country’s long civil war. They could leave their jungle encampments and rejoin society – go to work or school like any other citizen. The FARC ceased to be a group...